


you are coming down with me

by sabinelagrande



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe - Dark, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Betrayal, Dark!Sif, F/M, Hate Sex, Love/Hate, Marriage, Trying To Conceive, minor off-screen character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-01
Updated: 2012-11-01
Packaged: 2017-11-17 12:41:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/551680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabinelagrande/pseuds/sabinelagrande
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sif and Loki were never destined to be happy together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you are coming down with me

They put the wedding before the coronation simply because it is more expedient. The coronation will be years in the planning, require the coordination of thousands of people and countless items, grand processional arches down to the candleholders for the tables. The wedding will take months, still plenty of preparations to be made, but in certain ways, making sure those months occur as quickly as possible is more important than expediting those years.

Loki is already king, but he is not yet married. He needs to get Sif in his hands; she is his secret ally, his plant, his confidant, but he needs his hooks in her as deep as he can get them. Sif is slippery, self-interested, and if she does not get what she wants, if he starts to bore her, she will leave him. He can't let that happen, so the wedding must be as soon as possible. It's much easier for a woman to slip out on her lover than it is for the queen of Asgard to abdicate.

There is the baser fact that he can't have her again until then, lest the kingdom learn to count to nine.

In due time, they are wed. At the beginning, they make love a few nights a week. Their chambers are separate, and he goes to her, his passings marked by the palace. It shouldn't be salacious, but people titter over it, for reasons that escape Loki. She is his wife, and what they do is private and necessary. 

It's not like it was before they were wed, when they were merely compatriots. There is fire still, but not the same kind, a steady flame instead of an inferno. He has no complaints; it's satisfying, fulfilling, and as they lie side by side in the darkness, his mind is wiped clean, filled back up with nothing but bliss.

They both know he is trying to get a child on her. They are both good enough not to mention it; there is no reason to talk about something they already know, something that colors the passion between them.

\--

Being king, Loki learns very quickly, is tedious work.

Loki is the king Asgard deserves, a king that will lead it to great victories. He has already shaken Jotunheim out of the branches of Yggdrasil, scoured the universe clean of the plague of the frost giants. Indeed, he is the only one left, and none in Asgard know, none except Odin, who will never wake again, and Frigga, who would never tell.

Loki is a good king, a fair ruler, one who will serve the cause of justice. All will be the same under his rule, all except the royal family, which has been reduced to Frigga and Sif by now. It's just that Loki never realized how much normal people fought. He knew that great nobles went to war, that old families had their disputes going back seemingly until the beginning of time, but his court is filled with people fighting over the right to petty scraps of land and sickly fowl.

No wonder his father spent so much of his time sleeping. This drudgery is almost too much to bear.

Over the centuries he has perfected his ability to remain unreadable, to look interested when he couldn't care less. His mind is wandering as the next supplicants approach, an old man and two young ones. One of them looks like the old man, a fine image of what he must have been like in his youth, but the other looks nothing like either of them.

"State your business," Loki says.

"My father has promised his entire inheritance to my brother," one of the young men says. "We have both cared for him in his old age. I love him dearly. I would merely ask for a consideration."

"He's not my son," the old man says dismissively. "He's my wife's brother's boy, took him in after his father died. I fed him and clothed him for all these years. I don't owe him anything."

"I award the entire inheritance to the adopted son," he says, a mask of boredom on his face even as he grips the arm of the throne, hard enough that his fingers hurt. All of them look shocked, as if they had expected to fight for longer, to make their arguments in full. 

Loki has no time to waste on fulfilling people's expectations.

"I would beg the indulgence of my king," the adopted son says, bowing his head. "I do not wish to take anything away from my brother. I would share everything with him."

"If he actually deserves it, then share it with him when you get it." He looks the three of them over. "Hopefully, it won't be long. Next case."

\--

A year passes.

There is no child.

His visits become more frequent. Some weeks they are only times they see each other.

\--

It comes to Sif little by little. Loki made his promises and Sif did not believe them, but there was one that she depended upon, one more important than anything else.

Loki is squeamish, but Sif is a warrior. She has plenty of blood on her hands, blood that she spilled in fair combat. She is unafraid of blood, is not under the impression that it lessens her to have cut others down. To do less on the battlefield is weakness, insanity. She does what she must for Asgard, and if that includes bloodshed, then she will fight on.

The queen of Asgard is not a warrior. The queen is not ornamental, no, not a figurehead, but she does not ride into battle, does not risk herself in something that others can handle on her behalf. She gives favors and arranges victory celebrations. She cares for the wounded when the healers are overwhelmed with death. She does not have blood on her hands.

When she realizes she has been tricked, when the last of her fight has been taken away, she rends her garments and weeps for it, for everything she has lost. Her friends have left her, long since mourned for, but this is a harder thing to bear, the loss of a piece of herself, the loss of her once-life.

Sif will not die a warrior's death.

Her armor does not rust. It is hung proudly in a hall of great trophies, wonders of Asgard. Sif does not go there. She does not need to be reminded that she has been captured.

\--

A century passes.

There is no child.

Sex is a formality, a necessary inconvenience for both parties, but it must be done. The line of the house of Odin must be preserved. Loki will not let it die.

\--

Loki has waited too long between wars. Asgard plays at peace, lets its claws dull over time. They pretend not to notice how the other realms talk about them, how there are whispers about how easy it would be, what a few soldiers could do to their lazy land. They need to have it proven to them that nothing is safe, that they must remain on their guard at all times.

One of Loki's generals calls him paranoid. Loki has him killed.

The plan is not without its flaws, but Loki has the means to get his army in quickly and without warning, which is the key part of his plan. Their opponents are not the brightest children of Yggdrasil, and if his forces come out of nowhere, attacking like- Loki hates himself for even thinking of this comparison- lightning, they will have an advantage that will be almost impossible to overcome.

The war goes on for three years, and Muspelheim is not defeated. There are losses. Perhaps they lose more than Loki admits when they return, and his silver tongue does little to mask the absence of the ones who do not come home.

When he sees her next, Sif says nothing. She does not even deign to insult him.

\--

A thousand years pass.

There is no child.

They are getting older. There are silver strands in her hair now. No one knows how much time is left, only that it is running out.

\--

Loki's reign has, perhaps, worn out its welcome in certain corners of Asgard. He no longer sees peasants and mediates their petty squabbles. He no longer marches to war. These things do not mean there is peace; there are rumblings, mutterings that Loki is done as ruler, that he is no longer what can be called a good king, that perhaps he never was.

So it's a bad decade. He's had worse.

Then the unthinkable- or perhaps inevitable- happens. Heimdall's prison cell is an elaborate maze, a way to mock one who can see everything. Escape is impossible, yet one day, the masonry that covers the entrance is torn apart, the jailkeeper and his minions incapacitated on the floor. Loki does not know why Heimdall and his confederates left them alive, when the first thing they do is give up the names of the betrayers.

When the guards come for Sif, she does not fight; when she is accused, she does not deny. Deep within him, Loki wishes that it hurt more. He wishes that he could say that the sting was worse coming from someone so close, an intimate, a partner. He wishes he could say that Sif was any of these things. She is not, no longer, hasn't been in so many years that he does not care to count them.

Into prison she goes. No one is exactly crying for her blood, and Loki has larger problems to worry about than thinking of some creative punishment for his faithless queen. Heimdall knows the secret ways, the same paths as Loki, the means to run along Yggdrasil's branches. In no time he will reach Vanaheim and Thor, will bring him and the Warriors Three and who knows who else back with him.

Loki shears Sif's hair as a lesson, as a punishment; he shears her hair so that he won't be able to look at her and see what he once had. He punishes no one but himself, because he goes to her anyway. When they fuck, it is angry from every side; this isn't about the heir, isn't about the throne, just about the two of them and how much they have come to hate each other, the broken things they have become.

He prefers not to think that she wins, because he prefers not to think that he loses. If anyone wins, it is Thor, Thor who sweeps in like a thing out of legend, a golden savior to wash away the blight that is his brother's rule.

Loki won't deny that certain things have gone to hell, but calling it a blight is a little much.

He hears she wears a circlet to the wedding and a helm to the coronation, completely unashamed of her cropped hair, proud of her part in betraying him.

He would expect nothing less. In a strange way, it reminds him of why he admired her so.

\--

Sif's child is named Ullr, and Loki does not see him until he is ten years old.

"You've borne my brother's son," Loki says sourly. "At long last. How happy I am for you."

"You said you wanted the line of the house of Odin to be unbroken," she says flippantly. He wants to snarl at her, but he holds his tongue. She shakes her head. "No one here ever could count."

Loki wants to give no sign that he even catches her meaning, no indication of the feeling that wells up inside of him, the surging tide that overcomes him. He can see in her eyes that his emotions bleed through anyway, showing on his face. His son will sit on the throne of Asgard, like it or not; even if he dies here in prison, he will have won.

"Everyone thinks him the son of Thor," she tells him. "If you want to claim him, leave these walls and do it."

"There is no reason to trust that you will not put me right back here once I have disposed of my brother," he points out. "You could rule alone until my _nephew_ was old enough."

"There is no reason to trust me at all," she says plainly. "But I know how bored you must be, Loki. You think you can bide your time and watch your plans unfold, but you never could sit still."

"You would choose me over my brother," he says, raising an eyebrow at her. "Over your dear old friend."

"Thor I love dearly," she tells him, "but we were made for each other, you and I."

He snorts. "A pair of miserable creatures."

Her smile is fond. "Who are we to inflict ourselves on anyone else?" She walks over, rapping on the door, and it swings open. "Heed my words," she tells him, "if you can remember the time when you used to do that."

"There never was such a time," he says, but he is smiling. She leaves, and the door is shut and bolted behind her.

Six months, he thinks. Six months before he begins work on the guards. He can't start now, not if he wants Sif to look innocent; he has no concerns about whether or not she'll be punished, but the more it looks like she's not helping, the more useful she is. But six months to the day from now, it begins.

No one here can count, anyway.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] you are coming down with me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/695634) by [sabinelagrande](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabinelagrande/pseuds/sabinelagrande)




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